Parricidal Son: The Murder of Cassia Rivulet and the Collapse of Postcolonial Time

In this essay Glenn A. Elmer Griffin adopts a January 2009 parricidal attack in St. Lucia as an instantiation of the escalating problem of fratricidal crime in the postcolonial Eastern Caribbean. Following the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Griffin argues that this violence constitutes the nonarrival of postcoloniality as it is anticipated by Frantz Fanon’s periodization of fraternal violence. The familial murder embodies an unbroken period of self-killing that warrants a critical reexamination of the provisions of our postcoloniality and the terms of West Indian identity formation. The case resurfaces (m)other, ressentiment, hybridity, exile, and the notion of postkilling as the terms of this reexamination. Using Homi Bhabha and Achille Mbembe, Griffin reconsiders C. L. R. James’s construction of West Indian identity as the preparedness for violence and victory in terms of an irreducible temporal relation to the colonial, something more complex and reparative than the after-killing or “postcolonial.”